Columbia Survivors

[Celebration]

http://www.astrobio.net/news/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1821&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0

Summary (Jan 01, 2006): On board the Space Shuttle Columbia mission STS-107, researchers were studying the growth and reproductive behavior of the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, but the mission ended in tragedy in 2003 when the shuttle broke up during reentry. Remarkably, the worms, housed in specially designed canisters, survived the virtually unprotected reentry into the Earth's atmosphere and were recovered alive during the extensive recovery effort following the crash.

[hlthe2b]

1. that's one lucky roundworm...

pretty amazing... Too bad our astronauts weren't similarly housed in specially designed canisters.

[Surya Gayatri]

2. And the nematodes

shall inherit the earth--once we've rendered it uninhabitable for anything else.

[Gman]

3. Why this is important is, according to the article...

"This is a very exciting result. It's the first demonstration that animals can survive a reentry event similar to what would be experienced inside a meteorite. It shows directly that even complex small creatures originating on one planet could survive landing on another without the protection of a spacecraft," says Catharine Conley, Ph.D., Biologist AST at the NASA Ames Research Center and Principal Investigator on this experiment.

A long held theory of life on earth is that it originated elsewhere and came to earth on a comet or meteorite. This proves it can happen.

[Ready4Change]

4. Ummm...

Being in close orbit in a protected environment (the Shuttle) then surviving when it breaks up on reentry is a bit different than surviving for years as the bit of rock you are on, or in, is exposed to harsh interplanetary radiation, extremes of heat and cold, and THEN suffering rentry. Not to mention surviving whatever cataclysmic event ejected your bit of rock into space in the first place.

I'm still very skeptical of the theory that life transfered from Mars to Earth on bits of ejected rock. First, it seems really, REALLY far fetched. And second, it just isn't NECESSARY. If life could have formed on an early Mars, it could have formed here as well. If the right conditions bring it about, there's no reason to think that the right conditions don't ALWAYS bring it about, and it could have happened on both worlds at once. Insisting on the idea that life came from Mars is insisting on a complex solution to something for which we already have a far simpler answer.


Plus, it seems there is evidence that life formed here on Earth pretty early on. For ejecta from Mars to have "seeded" Earth, it would have had to form far earlier on Mars. That would be pretty quick work, and again creates a complex problem to which the simpler solution (life evolved here on Earth on its own) is much more likely.

To me, the extra-terrestrial origin of life theory is just a means of avoiding the question of how it could have formed on its own here. The question still remains. How did it form ELSEWHERE? It had to have done so. And if it did, then the far easier, far more LIKELY theory is that it developed on Earth, all on its own, without having drifted around on chunks of interplanetary, or interstellar, rock.

Until some spacecraft intercepts some asteroid or comet, and examines a bit of it and finds dormant life, I'm just not convinced by this theory.

[Gman]

5. Well then...

I guess if life did all the things you mentioned, this at least proves the life could have survived the plunge through earth's atmosphere.